William Lowndes Yancey
William Lowndes Yancey (10 August 1814-27 July 1863) was a member of the US House of Representatives (D-AL 3) from 2 December 1844 to 1 September 1846 (succeeding Dixon Hall Lewis and preceding James La Fayette Cottrell) and a Confederate States Senator from Alabama from 18 February 1862 to 27 July 1863 (preceding Robert Jemison Jr.). During the leadup to the American Civil War, he was a prominent secessionist, and he was nicknamed "the Orator of Secession". Biography William Lowndes Yancey was born in Warren County, Georgia on 10 August 1814, and he was raised in upstate New York and Massachusetts after his widowed mother remarried to a Presbyterian minister. After completing his education in Williamstown, Massachusetts (during which time he campaigned for the Whigs), he relocated to Greenville, South Carolina, where he served as a bookkeeper on his uncle's plantation. In 1834, he spoke out against John C. Calhoun during the Nullification Crisis and became editor of the Greenville Mountaineer in November 1834 as a result. He compared Calhoun to Aaron Burr, calling them both "fallen arch angels". In 1835, he married into a wealthy family and came to own a plantation with 35 slaves in Cahaba, Alabama. In 1838, he took over the Cahaba Southern Democrat newspaper, and his first editorial was a strong defense of slavery; he also opposed the establishment of a national bank, internal improvements, and expanding federal power, and he came to support Calhoun due to his support for a gag rule on the slavery debate in the US Congress. In 1839, he moved to Wetumpka in Elmore County, where he opened the Argus and Commercial Advertiser. Yancey, a radical Southern Democrat, entered politics as a Democratic member of the Alabama House of Representatives in 1841, serving for one year; he then served in the State Senate from 1842 to 1843 and in the US House of Representatives from 1844 to 1846. He gained a reputation for his oratorical skills, and he was also a fierce advocate of states' rights and the Mexican-American War while opposing internal improvements and tariffs. In 1846, he resigned his seat due to his disgust with the Northern Democrats, and he then moved to Montgomery, where he purchased a 20-acre dairy farm and established a law partnership. He attended the 1848 Democratic National Convention, but he walked out after the party's nominee Lewis Cass refused to adopt his "Alabama Platform", which included proposals to protect and expand slavery and opposed the Wilmot Proviso. Yancey later opposed both the Compromise of 1850 and the Nashville Convention, and he soon became a "Fire-Eater", strongly advocating for secession. During the 1856 presidential election, he succeeded in convincing the state Democratic and Anti-Know Nothing Convention adopt the Alabama Platform, and he praised Preston Brooks' assault on Charles Sumner. In 1858, he participated in a rally supporting William Walker by claiming that his Central American enterprise was "the cause of the South." That same year, he called for the reopening of the Atlantic slave trade. In April 1860, he attended the Democratic National Convention at Charleston, where he led a walkout of the Southern Democrats after Democratic nominee Stephen A. Douglas refused to adopt the Alabama Platform. Yancey and the radical Southern Democrats ran their own candidate for President, John C. Breckinridge, and Yancey launched a speaking tour for Breckinridge across the American South and accused Douglas of being an "abolitionist". On 24 December 1860, after Republican Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election, a state convention was assembled, and Yancey was its guiding spirit. Yancey supported unilateral secession, attacking "cooperationists" (delegates who would vote to secede only if other Southern states did so as well) as allies of the Federal government and "public enemies". Ultimately, Alabama's convention voted 61-39 to secede, and it joined the Confederacy later that year. Under the Confederacy, Yancey and other radicals were sidelined as moderates such as President Jefferson Davis assumed leadership roles; Yancey, unlike most other Fire-Eaters, supported Davis' presidency, and he was appointed to head a diplomatic delegation to Europe to secure British and French recognition of the Confederacy. However, Yancey was tone-deaf, extolling the benefits of slavery to the staunchly-abolitionist British; Yancey was unsuccessful and frustrated in his mission. He returned to the Confederacy in 1862 and was elected to the Confederate Congress, where he became a critic of the Davis administration. He died of kidney disease in 1863 at the age of 48. 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